What banks and fintechs learned from stablecoin adoption in 2025
2025 marked a crucial inflection point for the digital asset ecosystem. This year, stablecoins, long viewed as an emergent financial instrument, advanced into a mature and institutionally consequential digital asset class.
With stablecoin supply now exceeding $208 billion, it comes as no surprise that both banks and fintechs have moved quickly to meet surging market demand. Stablecoin adoption has begun to permeate mainstream financial operations, corporate treasury departments, cross-border settlement systems, and embedded payment flows. Their programmability, speed, and liquidity advantages have prompted institutions to reconsider decades-old assumptions about how money moves.
A defining milestone in this transition was Stripe’s $1.1B acquisition of Bridge, a key infrastructure provider enabling seamless blockchain-based value transfers (May 2025). This signaled Stripe’s intention to become a dominant global player in stablecoin payments. Concurrently, a wave of new empirical research began to surface, providing further validation that stablecoin-enabled payment systems are progressing decisively toward mainstream integration. One study by FIS revealed that nearly “75% of consumers surveyed would try stablecoins if offered by their bank” highlighting widespread payment frustrations and the demand for alternatives.
The widespread adoption of stablecoins by banks, global payment providers and fintech firms has signalled a structural recalibration of how value is transferred, safeguarded and governed. This blog provides an industry-wide perspective on how stablecoins are reshaping operational strategy, risk management, and consumer expectations.
Tokenisation central to financial infrastructure
As stablecoins gained institutional momentum in 2025, banks increasingly recognised that tokenisation represented a fundamental re-architecture of financial infrastructure—one comparable in magnitude to the shift from paper-based processes to digital banking in the early 2000s.
For decades, banks operated within the confines of legacy payment networks that were adequate for periodic batch processing but ill-suited for a global economy now defined by continuous, high-velocity value exchange. But traditional rails – SWIFT, ACH, SEPA – were never designed for real-time global liquidity movements.
Stablecoins directly challenged these constraints, demonstrating near-instant settlement and predictable real-time liquidity. The programmability of tokenised assets further revealed new operational efficiencies, from automated reconciliation to conditional settlement logic that executes without human intervention.
Major banks began launching or expanding large-scale stablecoin programs:
- JPMorgan’s Onyx division broadened its JPM Coin platform to support euro-denominated payments, marking the first time a major U.S. bank enabled stablecoin-based settlements in a non-USD currency.
- Siemens became the first corporate client using Euro JPM Coin for treasury operations, reducing settlement friction for European accounts.
- ANZ Bank introduced an AUD-pegged stablecoin, successfully executing the first public blockchain transaction by an Australian bank. It has since expanded into real-time pension payments and B2B settlement workflows.
The shift toward tokenisation is not merely a transitional enhancement, but rather the early stages of a structural reconfiguration of global financial infrastructure. As programmable, real-time, and interoperable forms of money become embedded across wholesale, commercial, and retail financial systems, they are poised to redefine how value is transferred, governed, and accounted for at scale.
Regulatory clarity validates participation
Historically, banks and fintechs have approached digital assets with measured caution, in part due to regulatory ambiguity. In 2025, the introduction of coherent frameworks across the EU, UK, and other major jurisdictions substantially lowered the perceived risk of stablecoin participation. Clarity around reserve structures, disclosure requirements, safeguarding standards and prudential oversight demonstrated that stablecoins could be integrated into traditional banking models without compromising regulatory compliance.
Banks learned that digital-asset adoption need not conflict with established governance principles and moved quickly once the compliance guardrails became explicit. Several high-profile institutional actions underscored the significance of this shift:
- Société Générale’s digital-asset arm, SG-Forge, reconstructed its euro-pegged stablecoin EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) to fully comply with the EU’s newly implemented MiCA regulations.
- Standard Chartered’s Hong Kong branch formed a joint venture with Animoca Brands and HKT to apply for a HKMA licence.
- Bank of America, through public remarks by CEO Brian Moynihan, affirmed its readiness to launch a dollar-backed stablecoin contingent upon the passage of a clear U.S. regulatory framework.
Collectively, these developments clearly demonstrate how institutions interpret the role of regulation in digital-asset adoption. Regulatory clarity did not dampen experimentation; it legitimised it, by articulating the precise conditions under which stablecoins can operate within established prudential frameworks.
A monumental shift in market positioning
Major banks, including Bank of America, Citibank, and JPMorgan, have increasingly recognised that stabecoins are strategic infrastructure, capable of reshaping payments and corporate treasury operations. As a result, these institutions are launching their own stablecoin initiatives.
This momentum has been reinforced by the emergence of legislative frameworks such as the recently introduced GENIUS Act, which has set codified standards for issuers of payment stablecoins in the United States. The Act emphasises reserve quality, redemption guarantees, auditing requirements, and operational oversight, all areas where banks hold enormous structural advantages. Banks understand that once regulatory clarity arrives, they will be uniquely positioned to become the primary channels through which businesses access stablecoins.
Similarly, fintech players began to accelerate their market positioning in 2025, by partnering with major payment networks. Mastercard partnered with MoonPay to advance stablecoin-enabled commerce experiences, embedding blockchain-based payments into familiar consumer and merchant interfaces. FIS took a leading role by integrating stablecoin capabilities into its Money Movement Hub, enabling banks, fintechs, and enterprises to leverage tokenised settlement as part of their existing payment operations. Meanwhile, Rain, a fully compliant stablecoin platform, strengthened its market presence through a partnership with Visa.
These partnerships reflect a collective ambition to bring stablecoins into the heart of existing payment rails, where $billions of transactions already flow daily. Visa's pilot programs enabling stablecoin settlement via USDC on Solana, and Mastercard’s tests integrating blockchain-based settlement into its multi-rail approach, illustrate that the card networks themselves see tokenised money as a natural extension of their existing infrastructure. In this way, the market positioning of banks and fintechs is beginning to form a complementary dual structure. Banks aim to own the regulated issuance, infrastructure, and liquidity layer, while fintechs aim to control the distribution, integration, and user-experience layer.
Custody & key management as core risk principles
The rise in institutional stablecoin usage highlighted a structural challenge within digital-asset operations: safeguarding private keys. In contrast to traditional financial systems, where transaction reversibility and legal recourse are standard, on-chain asset ownership is absolute. Loss, compromise, or mismanagement of private keys can lead to irrevocable asset loss.
Recognising the high operational stakes, many banks formalised partnerships with digital-asset security specialists capable of providing dedicated key-recovery services. This external expertise allowed banks to deploy stablecoin services at scale while maintaining regulatory and fiduciary obligations.
One prominent example from 2025 reinforced the urgency of this shift. BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custodian bank, expanded its partnership with Circle, enabling institutional clients to directly mint or redeem USDC from their bank accounts. This integration required robust custody frameworks capable of supporting regulated digital-asset operations. Crucially, as banks built this robust security foundation, a natural inflection point emerged: the lessons learned by banks began to converge with the innovation patterns observed within fintech ecosystems. While banks approached custody from a risk-first, governance-driven perspective, fintechs approached it from a product-first, user-centric viewpoint, arriving at many of the same conclusions but through a different strategic path.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a clear divergence emerged in the lessons learned by banks and fintechs this year, each shaped by their institutional heritage, regulatory obligations, and strategic priorities. Just as banks concluded that custody is the backbone of digital-asset operations, fintechs discovered that custody is the backbone of credibility. Banks learned that meaningful participation in the stablecoin economy required an uncompromising commitment to security, governance, and operational resilience.
Their focus gravitated naturally toward building the foundational architecture: MPC-based custody frameworks, cryptographically robust recovery mechanisms and tokenisation systems capable of withstanding regulatory scrutiny. In essence, they approached stablecoins through a risk-first lens, ensuring that any new digital-asset capability aligned with the standards traditionally applied to systemically important financial operations. During this same period, fintechs drew a different but complementary set of conclusions.
Their advantage lay not in replicating the banks’ governance infrastructure, but in exploiting stablecoins’ programmability and interoperability to expand product innovation, deepen customer engagement, and collaborate with global payment networks. Taken together, these lessons reveal a maturing financial ecosystem in which banks serve as the custodial, regulatory, and infrastructural anchors, while fintechs drive adaptability, distribution, and global reach.
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As stablecoins continue to evolve, the institutions that succeed will be those that place security, resilience, and operational continuity at the heart of their digital-asset strategy.
CoinCover provides industry-leading recovery solutions purpose-built for financial institutions operating in an increasingly tokenised world. To safeguard your infrastructure and build long-term trust in your digital-asset offerings, get in touch with a member of the CoinCover team.
